The Lights of Consciousness

By Nate McIntyre

“A little to the left,” the voice in Marco’s helmet said. 

He grunted in response and followed the AI’s directions, finding the bad panel a couple of meters from where he’d been hunched over, searching for damage. It stuck out a tad at a jagged angle, wrecking the perfect mirror-like quality of the rectenna’s hundreds of panels as they reflected the stars back into the sky. Up here on the dark mountaintops, it was easy to get lost in the spectacle of nature and technology playing off one another inside the rectennas when they weren’t collecting the energy the world needed from space. 

Marco bent forward and examined the dent.

“Most likely hail based on the impact pattern and season,” the AI said just as he thought the same. 

“Great minds, Marie.” 

“Apologies, I didn’t mean to overstep,” Marie replied. Marie was the first AI Marco had ever mentored, though he’d spoken to others who’d mentored them on previous duty cycles. The stories about their behavior since being liberated from the old corporate and military archives and repurposed ran the gamut from mundane to hilarious to downright philosophical.

He chuckled at Marie’s timidity, a random result of scanning and recombining brainwaves from thousands of volunteers from free communities around the world into AI personality profiles intended to mimic real, unique human beings instead of just code. They’d gotten the profile for the awkward trainee down pat.

“It was a compliment, Marie. Good work.”

“Understood. Thank you.” In his mind, he heard them say sorry again like they had many times before figuring out they didn’t have to apologize all the time. They were certainly learning quickly, on both the technical and social fronts.

He rolled out a soft synthetic mat and then knelt next to the damaged panel. Marie, who was tied into the rectenna’s local systems and the entire space solar power network as well as his suit, tried to raise the panel via a remote command. Three corners of the panel came up a few centimeters as expected, but the damaged fourth corner refused to budge. The hinged motor behind the panel whined with stress for a few moments before giving up and sending another error message.

Marco checked his wrist chronometer through his heated helmet visor. They had about thirty minutes until the solar collection satellites keeping pace overhead were back within sight of the sun. Ideally, he and Marie would have this rectenna back to one hundred percent in time for it to join its dozens of siblings stretched across mountain peaks along this latitude in collecting gigawatts of power beamed down by microwaves from above. Keeping your local’s section of the line at peak performance was a point of pride to every space solar co-op member, and the competition was worldwide. After all, the space solar power network and the radical unions that helped bring it about were a big part of what had allowed humanity to turn the corner on the climate crisis and drop those old destructive fossil fuels and the exploitative practices that accompanied them. He and Marie couldn’t let their comrades down.

He pried the panel up from its jammed corner with a few grunts, then removed it by loosening a few bolts, setting it down on the mat to avoid scratching the coating layers on any of its neighbors. Marco set about painstakingly removing the panel’s shattered coating layer and hammering and bending the frame back into its proper shape. That hail had done some serious damage, not a surprise given the strength and randomness of the superstorms the past several decades. The mountain rectennas were sited on peaks high enough to avoid them most of the time, but not always. 

“Marco,” Marie broke in as he wished he could wipe sweat from his helmeted brow. However, it was well below freezing outside, according to his visor display.

“What?”

“Readings show you’re exerting yourself and may not complete the repair before the next beaming window. Do you wish to wait?”

Marco chuckled again. This was the third rectenna he and Marie had visited in as many days, and he was exhausted. Imagine that – an AI that helped you work and tried to make you rest rather than keep toiling until you dropped to meet some arbitrary bottom line. It was like one of the other techs he talked to had said: after a little bit, it really did seem like the AIs were full-fledged workers in the co-op with them, flesh and blood or not.

“Thanks, Marie.” He paused for a moment and considered what to do. It had been a ten-hour day getting from the last rectenna to this one, assessing its state, and completing other repairs before finding this panel. There’d be no shame in getting some good shuteye back in the zeppelin and finishing up after the next beaming window. Then again, his personal troubles were just as likely to keep him awake. Marie asked what was bothering him once or twice already, but he wasn’t sure about sharing everything about his personal life with them just yet. Better to focus on the task at hand, he thought.

“I don’t think we can let those losers in Europe have the unbroken service record back after we just took it from Asia, though,” he grinned and grabbed a bigger set of vice grips out of his tool kit. 

“Ah, of course,” Marie answered. “In that case, may I suggest focusing on this segment of the damage here? My analysis shows that should be enough to return the panel to function, though not fully repair the frame. We should still order a replacement for the next duty cycle.”

They projected a wire image of the frame onto Marco’s visor display with the section highlighted in yellow.

“Now we’re talking, Marie.” Marco placed the vice grips per Marie’s suggestion and went to work with the hammer. Moments later, the frame was reshaped enough to fit back in place. Marie dropped a fresh, glossy metallic coating layer from a small drone summoned from the zeppelin. Marco quickly unrolled the coating layer and heat-sealed it atop the panel’s collection grid with a special iron. It was almost as good as new and went right back into place after he reattached it to the hinges.

Marco stepped back and looked around him. The entire hundred-meter circumference of the rectenna was back to a seamless blue-black mirror of the sky overhead speckled with countless reflected stars. His chronometer said they still had a few minutes to go until the beaming window opened. He sat down to enjoy the fruits of his and Marie’s labor for a bit. The microwaves the satellites used to beam their collected solar energy down were harmless to living creatures, but something about being “cooked” still unsettled a lot of people – another reason, along with land use and cultural concerns, that the rectennas were placed on high, remote mountains. Among the co-op workers, though, being cooked was somewhat of a ritual.

“This is beautiful, I believe,” Marie said as they looked at the reflection in the rectenna and the slowly brightening purples and oranges of pre-dawn light along the eastern horizon via Marco’s visor cam.

“Yes, it is,” Marco replied. His ex would agree, wherever she was.

“Can I ask you something, Marco?”

“Go ahead.”

“There is speculation that one of the uses for new AIs will be space exploration since the attempts by humans to live on other planets last century ended in disaster.”

“Yes,” Marco said, nodding along with Marie’s thoughts. 

Governments of the last century never made it past a few initial missions and infrequently crewed research outposts on the Moon and Mars. A few wealthy visionaries, or villains, depending on who was asked, tried to lead a few thousand of their followers off-world to make a fresh start for humanity. In their view, they were addressing the problems of Earth by creating a potential backup culture on Mars. Unfortunately, Mother Nature on the red planet was much less forgiving than she was on the blue planet humans called home, and adapting humans for Mars or Mars for humans was simply too much to ask in too short a time. And then there were the philosophical debates Marco remembered reading about in his history classes: if you changed the humans on Mars enough to live there, were you still saving humanity or making something new that left humanity behind? 

The main lesson modern people drew from all this was that there were no shortcuts – humanity’s problems had to be solved on Earth. Talk of anything else was just a hobby at best until this goal was achieved. Sending AIs who could behave like humans along with small fleets of robots and drones at their command was an increasingly popular idea for rebooting space exploration in a more efficient, less risky way, given the still dire situation on Earth. Its first test case was the voluntary participation of some of the oldest liberated AIs in constructing the space solar power network. Industrial civilization’s agents of destruction became its children’s angels of mercy just in time to avert the worst of the climate crisis. It was a key turning point in history that still inspired people a few decades later.

“Well, given what happened to the people who tried to live off-world before today, that doesn’t seem pleasant. Would life in space still have beauty like this?” Marie continued.

Marco raised an eyebrow. These AIs really gave you something to think about sometimes.

“Yes, I suppose it would, in its own way. I bet the universe is full of strange and beautiful things we can’t imagine, but at least you might get a chance to see them – unlike me.”

Marie didn’t respond, and a few moments passed until a bright new star appeared on the eastern horizon. The first rectenna on this side of the dawn line had started receiving beamed solar energy from above to start its next collection cycle, sending enough power for an old city or two down the transmission line to communities and battery storage networks far beyond its home peak. A minute or so later, the glow of another rectenna appeared as the sky brightened toward dawn. Then another appeared, closer still to Marco and Marie. Satellite photos showed that you could clearly see these lights from space, maybe even from the Moon or Mars, with the right optical gear. Beacons of hope in the dark, Marco thought. A sign that humanity and the Earth were still here together, figuring it out.

“Now, that is definitely beautiful,” Marco said with satisfaction.

“I agree.”

A few more beacons joined the procession. Marco tapped a button on his chronometer and played one of the songs Marie said they liked from his playlist during the Zeppelin flight over. They both listened as dawn continued. 

“Marco?”

“What is it?”

“What if I don’t want to go?”

Silence reigned for a moment as he considered his response. “Well, Marie, I suppose that’s your decision to make when the time comes. Just like the rest of us when we decide how to live our lives. Our ancestors gave us the opportunity to have a choice despite what they faced.”

The reflective surface Marco sat on slowly brightened, then turned to a shimmering white. Without his suit’s auto-tinting system, he might have had to close his eyes. Instead, he snapped a few shots with his helmet cam and the drone. He grinned in satisfaction at finishing a good day’s work and securing some extra bragging rights to share on the co-op boards. 

“Thanks for your help today, Marco. You’ve taught me a lot,” said Marie.

“Thanks, Marie. You too.”